Databases may comprise objects such as tables and views. Each of these objects may comprise a plurality of fields. A software developer that created an object and later noticed a typo in a name associated with the object (e.g., a table name or field name), may desire to correct the typo without impacting a software product associated with the database. While the software developer may expect that object names may be altered after initial creation of a database, once a database is in use, such as supporting a software product, changing an object name or field name may be problematic. Instead of being able to rename an object such as a table, conventional names changes often require dropping an old table and then creating a new table. Furthermore, during a re-design of a database, database objects may be moved between different packages and a new software package may use a different namespace. In this situation, a new table may have to be created and the data from the old table may have to be copied to the new table. Moving data is typically costly in that it uses a lot of processor time and it can be very time consuming when moving large amounts of data.
Some database frameworks expect field names to comprise a specific name (e.g. client, aging, language, UserID, etc.). If an existing table is plugged into such a framework, the existing table may need to have its fields renamed or free a field name for a new field which is required by the framework database.
Furthermore, legacy systems may use tables and fields with abbreviated names to match old limitations in name length. For a database developer that is designing views and database procedures, more descriptive names may be desired. Thus, for legacy systems, there is a need to rename the objects in the database to be more descriptive. It would therefore be desirable to provide a system and method to rename database objects without the problems described above (e.g., having to create a new table and copy data to the table).